by Alexandre Erler Satoshi Kanazawa is currently in the news – see e.g. these articles in the Daily Mail, The Australian and Psychology Today. An evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, Kanazawa has just published a new…

A painting thought to be by Peter Paul Rubens has been barred from export this week. The ban on selling it to a foreign buyer lasts until March, with the possibility of an extension, and is intended to give British museums a chance to raise…

Elton John and Nicole Kidman have both recently had children by surrogate mothers. The usual enthusiasm that new babies receive has been tempered by the hostility that sometimes accompanies surrogacy. A thought that occurs to me is whether …

The prestigious scientific journal, Nature, reports that Germans are poised to allow genetic testing of embryos for serious genetic disorders. This follows a recent judicial judgement that genetic testing of embryos for serious disorders di…

Every day three people die in the UK while waiting in the transplant queue. In the face of the urgency to increase the organs available, some propose introducing economic incentives. A more moderate solution consists in choosing a public po…

Inflation is swinging upward in the UK and it will surely cause us some irritation soon in the supermarkets. But most of us do not have difficulty putting enough food on the table for our families, and it’s easy for us to forget that …

Avian influenza, or ‘bird flu’ is a significant risk to many different wild bird species as well as to domesticated birds including chickens. The virus subtype H5NI has already killed millions of chickens especially in Asia. H5N1 has also r…

by Charles L. Griswold (This piece was originally published in “The Stone” series of the New York Times (on-line), on Dec. 26, 2010, and is also available here along with responses by readers.   Thanks to Roger Crisp for invitin…

In North Kentucky, forty miles from its Creation Museum (where you can see Eve riding on a triceratops and videos in which weeping girls blame their moral degeneracy on their failure to believe in the verbal inerrancy of Scripture), ‘Answer…

Australia essentially bans sex selection, except to prevent babies being born with serious sex-linked disorders. The National Health and Medical Research Councils also prohibits it in its guidelines. A couple in the state of Victoria is cur…